Bird School
A Beginner in the Wood
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
An intimate exploration of the lives of birds and their interactions with man, by a preeminent naturalist.
Poets and scientists, saints and naturalists, stalk through these pages. Neighboring c**k robins duel almost to the death. Tawny owl widows are seen looking for tawny owl widowers to set up shop with. Blackbirds are found singing phrases from late Beethoven quartets, both in a garden in southern England (where they have been listening to records played through the open window of a drawing room) and in Bonn, where Beethoven himself first heard them and where they are still singing to the same rhythms two hundred fifty years later.
Bird School describes and follows Adam Nicolson’s progress over two or three years in trying to learn about, and eventually to create an environment friendly to, the birds of the farm where he lives in Sussex. In simple language that evinces his careful observational prowess, Nicolson aims to cross the boundary between the scientific and the prescientific understanding of birds, looking into why and how they sing, how they fly and breed, how they survive and migrate, how they have suffered at our hands, how we have loved them and damaged them, and how we might create, or re-create, a refuge for them. Here is a set of lessons for someone who knows little but cares a lot about the living world that is in such dire crisis. Here is life in the “rough grounds,” on the edge of culture and nature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this revelatory narrative, Ondaatje Prize winner Nicolson (Life Between the Tides) shares his experience observing birds near his home in Sussex. After realizing he "had never paid much attention to birds," Nicolson set out to educate himself on the creatures and built a shed in the countryside from which he could study them. In vivid and poetic prose, Nicolson describes the wonders he encountered ("The blackbird's song is like the sound of someone enjoying a lovely dinner, rolling around in his mouth the deliciousness of everything life has given him") and highlights a wide range of avian behaviors, like how songbirds—blackbirds, robins, and wrens—begin vocalizing in a particular order at the break of dawn likely because of their varying eye sizes; the bigger their eyes, the earlier they can detect the morning light and thus start to sing. Nicolson is especially good at illuminating what goes unseen (or unheard), like the fact that birds perceive time more slowly than humans. He also draws attention to the ways human activity, like intensive farming, has caused bird populations to plummet in recent decades. This is a beautiful love letter to the avian world.
